


In the Café of Reasonable Comfort

by Paul A (pedanther)



Category: Doctor Who: The Curse of Fatal Death, Doctor Who: Virgin New Adventures - Various Authors, Undisclosed Fandom
Genre: Gen, Humor, POV Third Person, Past Tense, Stealth Crossover, The eggplant parmigiana is outstanding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-12-30
Updated: 2004-12-30
Packaged: 2017-11-23 05:40:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/618711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pedanther/pseuds/Paul%20A
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the eve of the new millennium, and human history is stuffed up. Again. At least the eggplant parmigiana is still good.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Café of Reasonable Comfort

**Author's Note:**

> [First published on alt.drwho.creative. Archived 2013-01-01.]
> 
> Many and varied are the tales of how Ace and the Doctor parted ways; this version of her, the one who lives in 19th-century France and owns a short-range time machine which she uses to defend Earth from alien invasion and to go shopping at Marks & Spencer, is from the New Adventure _Set Piece_. (So is the café.)
> 
> Her dining companion is of course from ‘The Curse of Fatal Death’. (But if you haven't seen it, don't worry; you're sure to pick up the relevant details as we go along.)

_Glebe, Sydney, Earth. 30 December 1999, 7:59pm._

Dorothée leaned back and glanced casually around the café. She wouldn’t know the Doctor by sight, of course, but they’d arranged to meet at 8pm, and she expected him to be punctual; he knew as well as anyone the importance of precise timing in meetings between time-travellers. Which meant he’d be here in three… two… one…

“Dorothée? I hope you haven’t been waiting too long.”

Dorothée’s head snapped around, and she stared at the blonde woman in the red-and-black trouser suit who was seating herself at one of the two empty chairs.

A waiter came, deposited plates, left again.

“Well,” Dorothée drawled. “You said on the phone you’d regenerated again, but your voice didn’t sound _that_ different.”

The blonde looked blank.

Dorothée grinned. “Let’s try that again,” she said. “Me Dorothée. You Emma?”

The blonde nodded, looking relieved. “The Doctor will be along soon. He had some shopping to do, he said.”

“And he couldn’t let you watch him shopping?” Dorothée asked, raising an eyebrow. “Is he back to being a secretive git, then?”

Emma blinked. “No, usually he’s very good at explaining things–getting him to stop is more the problem, he loves showing off… what’s this parmigiana doing here?”

“That’s _me_ showing off,” Dorothée said. “The Doctor always has the eggplant parmigiana when we come here, so I wanted to have it ready when he came in. Only he’s going to be late, so–” She broke off, and frowned at the plates the waiter had left. “I ordered for three; there’s only two here.”

Emma shrugged, and started into the parmigiana in front of her. “The Doctor will probably hop back after the meal to let them know he’ll have been late,” she said.

“Does that a lot, does he?” said Dorothée, then waved a hand, dismissing the subject. “So, this secret shopping excursion… If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was an excuse to let the old girlfriend and the new girlfriend size each other up while the guy was safely out of the way…” She grinned at the idea.

Emma giggled. “That’s what _I_ said, and he told me not to be silly, you’re just old friends.”

“Did he now,” said Dorothée thoughtfully. “Did he say anything else?”

“He said that if he was too long, you could pass the time by telling me about this café.”

“Too right,” said Dorothée.

“So?” Emma prompted. “What’s so special about this café?”

“The eggplant parmigiana is outstanding,” Dorothée proclaimed.

“I know that already,” Emma said, pointing a fork at her. “What else?”

“What makes you think there’s anything else?”

“Well, that didn’t pass much time, did it?”

“Time is relative,” Dorothée said solemnly. “When would you say this café was built?”

Emma looked around the café, taking in the framed postcards on the white plaster walls, the rubbery-looking pot plants. “This is a trick question, isn’t it?”

“Of course it’s a trick question. What’s your answer?”

“I’d say it was built… fifteen, twenty years ago?”

Dorothée shook her head. “It wasn’t.”

“When was it built, then?”

“It wasn’t,” Dorothée repeated. “One day it wasn’t here, the next it was–weird pot plants, graffiti, and all.” She waved her hands expressively. “Ask anyone around here and they’ll tell you–well, probably they’ll tell you that of course it was built, they just can’t quite recall exactly when. And you know what _that_ means.” She looked at Emma, who nodded. “And in another few years, it’ll be gone again, the same way it came.”

“Wow,” said Emma, wide-eyed.

“That’s nothing,” Dorothée said. “In a few centuries’ time, it’ll happen all over again on Argolis. Then in Bellatrix City. Of course, I’m speaking linear time here. Properly speaking, the ‘next’ occurrence might just as easily be the café on Ehft, three thousand years ago.”

“Wow,” said Emma again. “So this café moves around in time and space? Does that mean the chef’s an alien?”

“No, no,” said Dorothée. “It’s not the same café, it’s half a dozen different cafés, which happen to be identical. The fact that the human chef here makes eggplant parmigiana exactly like the Janx chef in Bellatrix is a complete coincidence. Just like everything else about the cafés.”

“But it’s not really coincidence, is it?”

Dorothée shook her head. “A while back–and now I’m _not_ talking linear time, in linear time it hasn’t happened yet–a while back, a woman you won’t have heard of built her own home-made time machine and set out to see the universe. Her machine worked by punching a hole through the universe, connecting her here-and-now with the there-and-then she wanted to visit; the holes were supposed to heal up once she’d passed through them, but she didn’t really know what she was doing, so she left a big multi-dimensional rift behind her until she ran into the Doctor.” The point of her knife waved about in the air between them, tracing a three-dimensional approximation of the four-dimensional path.

“And he fixed it?”

“Oh, he fixed the time machine but good,” Dorothée said. “But it was too late to do anything about the rift, so it’s still there. And things fall into it from time to time–like this café. Somewhere, somewhen, the original café fell into the rift, and it fell out in six different places.”

Emma looked thoughtful. “So why did the Doctor want you to tell me this?”

Dorothée shrugged. “Maybe he just thought you’d be interested. But as it happens, it’s related to what I wanted to talk to him about. I think I’ve found another one.”

“Another café?”

“No, another time rift. Well, another set of duplicates, but what I can see of the distribution doesn’t match the time rift I’ve just been talking about.”

“So what’s it a duplicate of this time? A lunch bar? A cinema?”

“A person.”

Emma stared at her.

“Oh, it’s not completely unheard-of. I remember the Doctor telling me once about this alien whose hyperdrive exploded when he tried to use it to take off from a planet… but anyway, I first ran into this guy in France; he was fighting with the British Army in the First World War. Didn’t think anything of it at the time, but then a few weeks later I ran into him again–in England, one hundred years earlier.”

“Another time traveller?” Emma suggested. “Or just a coincidence–we met a blue avian last month on Sivana that sounded just like the Doctor.”

Dorothée shook her head. “I was _there_ when he fell out of the timestream again–one moment, he was parading up and down, next moment, he was gone, and it was like he’d never existed. Good thing, too–another couple of days and he’d have been King the way he was going. Then there he was again in Victorian times–just making a quiet living and doing charitable works, thank God; I had enough of saving the Queen when I was travelling with the Doctor.” She poked at her parmigiana. “And I’ve just been to England again in this time zone, following another trail, and London’s full of the crukkers–comparatively speaking, I mean; I’ve found six so far, ranging from a peer of the realm to the cleaner at an art gallery. Several working for the foreign office, for some reason; it’s a wonder they’ve never bumped into each other.”

Emma looked thoughtful. “So, you’ve found this time rift, and you need the Doctor to fix it?”

“Need? No,” Dorothée said. “I reckon I can handle it on my own, this is just professional courtesy.”

“How _do_ you fix a time rift, anyway?”

“First thing you’ve got to do is work out what caused it–I’ve got that covered. You remember I mentioned a peer of the realm? He’s the original–that’s why there’s so many duplicates in London, because he keeps popping back into his own recent past to tweak things, and it’s put a lot of stress on that one patch of space-time. Come to think of it, that probably explains why most of the modern duplicates are imperfect copies–like recording a program over and over on the same worn-out tape… sorry, I can see your eyes glazing over. Where was I?”

“What’s the second step for fixing a time rift?”

Dorothée grinned. “Stop it happening, of course. The advantage of being a time traveller in this line of work is that you know what’s going to go wrong before it happens. Lord Look-at-me-stuffing-up-reality has his fingerprints all over history, but from where we’re sitting he hasn’t actually put them there yet–today, his time machine’s still in pieces in the coach-house. All I have to do is pop over some time before the maiden voyage tomorrow night, sneak in, and break something small but vital, and the whole thing will be nipped in the bud. He only stumbled on the secret of time travel by chance, he’ll never know what went wrong.”

Emma looked puzzled. “But if you prevent the time rift from ever having happened in the first place, won’t you cause some kind of terrible paradox?”

“I can see why the Doctor keeps you around,” Dorothée said. “Yes, preventing the time rift will take a bunch of people out of history, and normally that’s impossibly dangerous; but this is a special case. Remember I said that when the duplicate in Regency England disappeared, history went back to normal? Same with all of them, as far back and forth as I can reach: none of them have _any_ real effect on history, you wouldn’t even know they’d been there unless you were there at the time, so the net effect of removing them from the timestream will be nil.”

“You’re sure?”

“Well, all right, I’m going to get the Doctor to check the bits of history I can’t reach, in case one of them somehow had an effect that persisted after he was gone, but it’s just a formality, I don’t really expect it to… hello, what’s this?”

The waiter was approaching their table again, bearing a third eggplant parmigiana and a small gift-wrapped box.

Dorothée looked toward the café’s entrance. As she’d expected, the Doctor was crossing the café toward them; he would arrive at the table at the same time as his parmigiana.

What she hadn’t expected was that his new face would be so familiar.

“Cruk. I _am_ going to need the Doctor’s help with this one after all…”

Emma, whose face had lit up at the sight of the Doctor, looked puzzled. “What makes you say that?”

Dorothée sighed, and began digging through her knapsack in search of the photograph of Edmund, Lord Blackadder.

“Finish your parmigiana,” she said. “I’ll explain later.”

* * *

_Featuring the Ninth Doctor and Emma, this interlude takes place between the television stories ‘Doctor Who: The Movie’ and ‘The Curse of Fatal Death’._

**Author's Note:**

> The major crossover is, of course, [Blackadder](http://archiveofourown.org/tags/Blackadder).
> 
> The _other_ crossovers are left as an exercise for the reader.


End file.
